When confronted with the threat of pain and distress, our natural inclination is to avoid any situation in which the threat is likely to be present. It's 'natural' because it's rooted in out evolutionary history—creatures that don't avoid threats to their survival don't last very long.
But avoidance isn't just something in our evolutionary past that should be jettisoned from our repertoire of behavioural responses. In fact, in many cases, avoidance is perfectly rational, healthy, and even necessary.
For example: You should probably avoid that car speeding towards you as you cross the intersection. You should probably avoid eating uncooked chicken. You should probably avoid walking alone at night through poorly lit neighbourhoods frequented by gangs.
There's nothing irrational or unhealthy about avoiding any of these things. On the contrary, failing to avoid them could be deemed irrational and unhealthy. So, at least sometimes—and in fact, often—avoidance is an intelligent strategy.
But unfortunately, the mind doesn't stop there. It takes this otherwise intelligent survival strategy and unwisely applies it to anything that threatens to cause you any degree of pain or distress—for many of us, even the possibility of the slightest discomfort gets interpreted as a life-threatening threat.
There are at least three reasons why avoidance can be bad for us.
1-Avoidance might be helpful in the short-term, but not in the long-term.
Even if you successfully avoid feeling X now, this won't eliminate X or prevent X from occurring later (e.g. avoiding giving a toast doesn't eliminate my fear of public speaking or prevent it from arising again later). And worse than that, avoidance might produce long-term harm, rather than merely failing to eliminate the avoided situation/object (e.g. drinking before my speech to avoid feeling fear might cause intoxication, adverse health outcomes, etc).
2-Avoidance creates an increasingly stronger association between the situation/object that you're avoiding and the pain/distress/anxiety that you feel about it.
By avoiding X, you're essentially telling your mind "X is bad. It's so bad that we can't be around it. We can't handle it. We can't go anywhere near it. Stay away from X!!!" When I avoid giving that toast due to my fear of public speaking, I reinforce the connection between giving a toast and feeling fear. It's as simple as that. And the more you do this, the stronger this connection gets. Put differently, by avoiding something, you teach and train your mind to become more and more afraid of it.
3-Avoidance prevents you from doing what matters to you.
This is ultimately the most important of all: avoidance causes you to miss out on opportunities and from living an engaged life in commitment to freely chosen values. It robs you of the chance of being who you want to be, and of living how you want to live. Every time I avoid giving that toast, I'm missing out on an important opportunity to do something that matters to me—even if I don't care very much about giving toasts, because every time I choose to engage rather than avoid, I'm taking one step closer to becoming the person I want to be.
